“Time is what a clock measures,” said Albert Einstein.
So far, so good. But is it really so simple?
Again and again, we try to make time stand still and
mark the present instant. We want to meet deadlines,
plan the future, remember the past. We hurry and we
wait. Such are the constraints of time which define our
daily life.
But we enter into a different measure of time, when
holidays are celebrated, private and religious ones.
Our passage from childhood to adulthood, our
wedding, the birth of a child, death and dying—these
defining moments mark periods in our life. We greet
them ceremoniously, and commemorate their anniversaries year after year, simply because they remind us
of the transience of life.
Days of remembrance and religious holidays carry
us into another, extraordinary world, in which time
appears to stand still. This holy time has no past and
no future. It takes place in the moment, in the eternal
present of creation. But that time, too, is finite. Its end
is mourned at the close of Shabbat, when our separation
from the holy and re-entry into the profane is accomplished through a ceremony on Saturday evening.
In this issue of the JMB Journal, the Jerusalem
philosopher Hillel Ben Sasson writes about Shabbat
as an example of the concept of holy time in Judaism.
The Old Testament scholar William P. Brown comments
on the Book of Ecclesiastes. Mirjam Wenzel traces out
the perspective on time in messianic utopias, while
Karen Körber describes a modern celebration of the
ancient Bar Mitzvah ritual. The scholar of pedagogy
Micha Brumlik investigates the common origins and
gradual separation of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur
and the Christian Good Friday. Social scientist Detlev
Claussen uncovers religious rituals and emotional
charisma in soccer, and Ellen Presser, director of the
Cultural Center of the Jewish Community in Munich,
recollects an episode in which time meant loss.
In the section JMB Inside—where we report on events
and developments in the museum—time is also our
underlying subject. In mid-October, we will open our
first major Judaica exhibition “A Time for Everything.
Rituals Against Forgetting.” Displaying more than
50 objects, we illustrate the process of personal,
collective, and historical remembrance.
We wish you, as always, great pleasure in reading
our ninth issue of the JMB Journal!

Steps of Life. This depiction
places the Bar Mitzvah—the
coming of age—at the top.
(Germany, around 1900)

Ecclesiastes has often been called the strangest book of the Bible. Nowhere else in Scripture
do we find such a paradoxical collection of philosophical reflections on wisdom, history, creation,
human destiny, and life’s purpose. A central issue that underlies many of these themes is the
nature of time.

A boy whose voice is cracking struggles to get through the week’s portion of the Torah,
while his mother dissolves in tears. That’s how a Bar Mitzvah is depicted by Hollywood.
But how does the real world look? Especially if the ritual—and the following party—has to
give expression to a family’s own understanding of what it means to be Jewish.

The Messiah in Judaism represents a figure in the history of ideas which has undergone many metamorphoses and yet always appears to proffer the same promise: namely, that Olam ha-zeh (Hebrew:
this world) will one day be redeemed by a just order, the messianic era. Traces of the Messiah in the
20th century.

“God created the two
great lights and the stars,“
Hermann Fechenbach, woodcut
on paper, 1923 to 1932

Time is a rather elusive concept. Grasping moments of it is never enough
to capture it entirely. Holiness is a concept as elusive as time. How could
we speak of both together without finding ourselves chasing after thin
air? Looking at Shabbat.

The highest holidays in Judaism and Christianity are Yom Kippur and Easter, in
Protestant practice Good Friday. Both holidays are marked by an atmosphere of
seriousness. And both derive from a practice originating in the Service of Atonement
in the Temple of Jerusalem, with its animal sacrifices and scapegoat ritual.

The author’s father (2nd from the
right) began his career as a barkeeper in a pub for US soldiers in
Spangdahlem/Trier. June 1956

It’s an ancient cliché that Jews are good with money.
The opposite is true for the author’s father: Even though
he knows a good business deal, there is never enough
income left to live. And even inheriting requires talent.

8 S. / p. 60

90 Minuten
90 Minutes
Der deutsche Nationalspieler
Lukas Podolski wird von seinen
Fans regelrecht vergöttert.
The German national player
Lukas Podolski, as seen by
his most ardent fans.

Ecclesiastes has often been called the strangest book of the Bible.
Nowhere else in Scripture do we find such a paradoxical collection
of philosophical reflections on wisdom, history, creation, human
destiny, and life’s purpose. A central issue that underlies many of
these themes is the nature of time, which receives its own paradoxical treatment in Qoheleth’s musings.1 On the one hand, time
has no “arrow.” On the other hand, the “passage” of time leads to
total dissolution, a “waste of time.”
For the enigmatic sage, time neither flees nor flows. Time
simply is: past, present, and future bound together in one encircled whole. Like the cosmic elements locked in their incessant
cycles (Ecclesiastes 1:4–11), the course of time offers no change.
This is abundantly clear in the most well-known passage in
Ecclesiastes (3:1–8):
1

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter
under the heavens:
2
a time to bear / and a time to die /
a time to plant / and a time to uproot what is planted;
3
a time to kill / and a time to heal; /
a time to break / and a time to build;
4
a time to weep / and a time to laugh; /
a time to mourn / and a time to dance;
5
a time to throw stones / and a time to gather stones; /
a time to embrace / and a time to refrain from embracing;
6
a time to seek / and a time to lose; /
a time to keep / and a time to throw away;
7
a time to tear / and a time to sew; /
a time to be silent / and a time to speak;
8
a time to love / and a time to hate; /
a time of war / and a time of peace.

This “seasonal” poem features fourteen paired polarities.
Reading the poem line by line is like listening to the hypnotic ticktock of a grandfather clock. If the life of the cosmos in chapter 1
runs like a spinning wheel going nowhere, human life resembles
something of a swinging pendulum in chapter 3. Laughter and
mourning, love and hate, war and peace are the opposite poles
within which life oscillates, inexorably, between birth and death.
Time, thus, is measured by oscillations. It swings rather than flies
or flees, advancing nowhere. And through time’s modulated oscil-

1 Although not the author of the book as a whole, Qoheleth is the featured speaker in Ecclesiastes.

lations, there is nothing to be gained (Ecclesiastes 3:9). No gain,
no progress, no direction.
It is worth noting that the laws of physics also do not recognize the progress of time. “The laws of physics that have been
articulated from Newton . . . up until today, show a complete symmetry between past and future.”2 In this respect, time resembles
space itself, which also has no arrow: there is no up or down, right
or left. For Einstein, the distinction between past, present, and
future is “only an illusion, however persistent.”3 The past does not
fade away and the future is not waiting to happen, for both simply
co-exist, each moment no more valid or real than any other. And
for Qoheleth, each moment is equally precious.4
A corollary to Qoheleth’s static notion of time is that change
makes no sense: “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Moments in time do not change; they simply are. From
the physicist’s standpoint, time remains the ultimate mystery, for
there is nothing in physics that explains why we remember the past
yet cannot read the future. And Qoheleth claims that we cannot
even remember the past (Ecclesiastes 1:11). According to the ancient
sage, human life is bound by the stunning symmetry of amnesia
and ignorance, amnesia of the past and ignorance of the future.
Nevertheless, time does not stand still. It is no coincidence
that Qoheleth illustrates time as a series of repeated seasons,
of perpetual swings and cycles. Time is malleable. In Einstein’s
theory of general relativity, time can dilate as much as length
can contract and mass can increase, all in relation to an object’s
relative velocity. The faster the speed, the slower the time. Time,
in other words, is very much tied to motion. The ancient sage
would agree.
Following the poem, Qoheleth provides commentary: “[God]
has made everything suitable for its time. Moreover, he has put
a sense of eternity into their minds, such that they cannot
Qoheleth contrasts punctiliar time (v. 11a; ē͑ ṯ) with the totality
of time (v. 11b; ō
͑ lām). He claims that God has implanted an all-

determine what God has done from beginning to end” (3:10-11).

2 Brian R. Greene. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Vintage Books 2004:
144–45 (italics original)
3 Einstein quoted in Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: 139
4 Scholars have long noted something of a carpe diem perspective to Qoheleth’s thought.

Ein beliebtes Motiv in der
Populärkunst des vorletzten
Jahrhunderts war die Darstellung von Lebensstufen,
wie sie auf dieser um 1900
in Deutschland entstandenen
Papieroblate zu sehen sind.
In the late 19th century steps
of life were a favoured motif
in popular art. This decoupage
was made in Germany,
around 1900.

encompassing temporal perspective within every human mind.
And yet this mental sense of timelessness conceals as much as it
reveals. Qoheleth concludes that even though human beings have
the capacity to see beyond the transient moments of their lives,
there remains an unbreakable wall of ignorance, the mystery of
God’s involvement with time. Human beings, in other words,
remain ever out of the loop when it comes to discerning the
purpose of divine providence. The beginning and the end lie
beyond human understanding. Hence, a sense of timelessness

comes with a confounding limitation: it prevents any hope of
discerning God’s purpose. The wearying cycles of the cosmos
described in the chapter 1 and the unwavering swings of human
activity delineated in chapter 3 together create a sense of stalled
time, sense of timelessness that does more to obscure than to
illumine. The swings and cycles seem incessant, but eventually
it must all unwind.
Time and Chance
Enter “chance,” which plays a crucial, and brutal, role in Qoheleth’s
notion of time (Ecclesiastes 9:11–12):
11

Again I saw that under the sun the race does not belong to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the intelligent, nor
favor to the skillful, for time and chance befall them all. 12For, indeed, no one
knows his (or her) time. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught
in a snare, so humans are snared at a time of calamity, when it falls upon
them suddenly.

In time, life is beset by “time and chance” in ways that are
cruelly unpredictable. And over the “course” of time, life itself is
extinguished. (Ecclesiastes 12:1–7)
1

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, / before the days of trouble
come, / and the years draw near, / when you will say, “I have no pleasure in
them”; 2before the sun darkens, even the light, as well as the moon and the
stars, / while the clouds return with rain; 3in the day when the guards of the
house tremble, / while the strong men cower, / and the women who grind stop
because they are few, / while those who look through the windows see dimly;
4
when the double-doors on the street are shut, / while the sound of the mill is
low, / and one rises at the sound of a bird, / while all the daughters of song are
brought low; 5when one is afraid of heights, / and terrors are in the road; / the
almond tree blossoms, / the locust drags itself along and desire fails. / Yes,
humans go to their eternal home, / and the mourners will go about the streets;
6
before the silver cord is snapped, / and the golden bowl is broken, / and the
jar is broken at the fountain, / and the vessel broken at the cistern, 7and the
dust returns to the earth as it was, / and the life-breath returns to God who
gave it.

Between darkness and dust, Qoheleth has chosen a remarkably diverse array of images to demonstrate how death affects all
areas of life, from the cosmic and the commercial to the domestic
and the individual. The seemingly perpetual cycles and swings of
human life eventually stop, as the world passes away in cosmic
dissolution and the self in bodily deterioration. The kinetic leads
to the kenotic; energy expended is energy dissipated. Call it
“entropy” or, as Qoheleth says, hevel (literally “vapor”).
For Qoheleth, time lacks an arrow. But time does bear, one
might say, a “claw.” Coupled with “chance,” time ensures life’s
unpredictability, which can sometimes turn cruel. But the final
cruelty is the dissipation of life itself, yielding only death and
decay. Thus, the sage admits to something of time’s unidirectional
nature after all: time leads inevitably to death. There is no other
course. By highlighting the paradox of time’s static nature, on
the one hand, and the passage of time, on the other, Qoheleth is

saying that the “progress” of time is far from purposeful. Time
has its ravages, and its course is distinctly dysteleological.
William P. Brown is Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur,
Georgia, and author of The Seven Pillars of Creation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

The Bar or Bat Mitzvah, when Jewish boys and girls
reach religious maturity, is a classic example of the rite
of passage. In American movies the practice is depicted often, and always in the same way: A boy whose
voice is cracking struggles to get through the week’s
portion of the Torah in Hebrew sing-song before the
assembled community, while his mother dissolves
in tears.
At the Bar Mitzvah under discussion here, there
was no Hollywood cameraman present. But the private
television station JewishNewsOne had sent a team to
record the occasion on which Mark Mosche Belkin was
called up to the Torah for the first time, on 21 Sivan
5773 (30 May 2013). Mark is the son of Ljudmila and
Dmitrij Belkin—she is an art historian and he is a historian and curator at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.
Both came from the Ukraine to Germany in the 1990s
as part of the so-called “quota refugee” program for
Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They
have reflected often and publicly on their migration,
their life in Germany, and each of their distinct paths
toward a cultural and religious Judaism. Thus the Bar
Mitzvah, too, represents an attempt by the family to
give expression to its own understanding of what it
means to be Jewish, while confirming at the same time
their belonging to the larger Jewish community—in its
religious forms and rituals and in the various ways of
understanding them. From the selection of the date
and place, in which the celebration took place, through
the Torah reading and the culminating party: this Bar
Mitzvah proceeded according to a carefully structured
film script. This script shows how a ritual—and a family’s contradictory interpretations of it—can look today.
And it shows that the experience of migration this
family has behind it continues to inform a perspective
central to the family’s identity today.
Mark was called to the Torah not—as usual—on
Shabbat, but on a Thursday. And here we’re already
in medias res. For in a sense, it all began with the fact
that Mark had wanted to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in
the big Westend Synagogue, like most of his friends
and schoolfellows at the Jewish School in Frankfurt.
But here, services are conducted in accordance with
the Orthodox rite, which would have meant that his
mother would have had to follow the event from a distance—from the balcony reserved for women. Ljudmila
regards a seat in the balcony as unacceptable for a
number of reasons. On the one hand, she does not see
the need for dividing the sexes during services; on the

other, sitting in the balcony relegates her to the role of
a mere observer. That did not suit her at all, especially
not since it is the religious education of her son we are
talking about. This latent conflict between Mark, who
wanted a celebration like that of his peers, and his
mother, who had reservations about certain requirements of the Orthodox tradition, led to a compromise
with respect to both the date and place of the festivities. This compromise was made possible by Mark’s
religion instructor Asaf Grünwald, who is also prayer
leader of the Frankfurt Jewish community in the
Westend Synagogue, and Andrew Steinman, Orthodox
rabbi of the retirement home of the Henry-and-EmmaBudge Foundation in Frankfurt. Since the week’s Torah
portion, the parashah, is read on Mondays, Thursdays,
and the Shabbat, the rabbi and Mark’s religion instructor suggested holding the Bar Mitzvah on a Thursday,
so that those attending the service—men and women—
could sit together for the reading. At the same time,
Mark’s teacher could assume the role of cantor for the
ceremony. This meant a lot to Mark, whose teacher had
been an important guide for him in preparing for his
Bar Mitzvah.
Once they had decided when the Torah reading and
subsequent celebration would take place, they then
turned their attention to the question of where. Their
choice fell on a place which symbolizes local Jewish
history and contemporary life: the Jewish Museum of
Frankfurt, which resides in the former Rothschild
Palace. While this provided Mark and his friends with a
“cool” location for the festivities, it also let his parents
address their own concerns, namely to show that it is
possible to be free and unconventional, and Jewish at
the same time. This means, among other things, that
different members of the family practice their religion
in different ways, so that the family’s religious life
cannot be unambiguously characterized as either
“Orthodox” or “Liberal.” It also means that it should be
possible, in the context of a celebration, to structure
Jewish life as a religious and cultural way of life
together with the other members of the community.
The “other members of the community” were, on this
early evening in May, a large number and colorful mixture of guests, Jewish and non-Jewish, Russian speaking and German speaking—families that belonged, and
families that did not belong, to the Jewish community.
The room we entered into was divided into three sections. To the right was the area in which we later ate;
to the left was a small stage for the party; and in the

middle was a table with a cabinet next to it. The cabinet
was covered with a piece of velvet cloth.
When Mark’s parents greeted their guests, it became
clear that the theme of the rite of passage would be
subjected to a number of variations this evening. They
thanked all those who accompanied them on their path
toward Judaism over the past several years. Their
speech revealed not only that their own conversion had
been a process involving several stages, but also to what
extent the transformation and pluralization of Jewish
religious life in Germany were reflected in this process.
What followed was once again a transition, for now
the actions of the invited community needed to produce an aura of sanctity—despite the fact that only a
part of those present was familiar with the liturgical
rites. Spatially, the sacred order finds its orientation in
the bimah, the table covered all in white on which the
Torah was to be laid; and in the Ikea cabinet, decked with
a blue cloth, which was facing approximately east and
which was meant to symbolize the Aron ha-Kodesh—it
contained the borrowed Torah scrolls. Then there were
the kippot, which the superintendant of the Westend
Synagogue generously supplied for the ceremony. All
the men present, who did not have their own kippah,
put these on. The rabbi then handed around the siddurim, which announced the beginning of the reading.
Mark, his father, and his grandfather had by now taken
their seats, robed in their tallitot, and waited to be
called. While the kaddish was being recited, the prayer
leader took out the Torah scrolls, which came from the
synagogue of the retirement home of the Henry-andEmma-Budge Foundation. These scrolls were meant to
recall symbolically the ways of life, and particularly
the ways of survival, of previous generations.
Then Mark read the week’s Torah portion, the
Shlach Lecha, aloud in Hebrew. And because, in ritual,
it happens that the collective and the individual come
together in unpredictable ways, this parashah “fit”
all too well. It described how Moses is to send out his
men to see and test the suitability of the new land
of Canaan—its people, its cities, its soil. And in Mark’s
commentary, we heard a resumption of the leitmotiv
which defined the various stages of the evening:
migration as an experience of individuals and families.
Mark, too, had had this experience—when he moved
to the USA for one year with his parents, and had to
find his own in a foreign place.
Not accidentally, a moment particularly moving for
many in the congregation came when Mark’s father

and grandfather, following Mark, were called to read the
Torah. The grandfather, Jakob Belkin, had continued to
view himself as a secular Jew after his emigration from
the Soviet Union. He participated in this rite, the reading of the Torah in synagogue, for the first time in his
life—just like his grandson. It was a compelling picture,
to see how three generations of Belkins confirmed
their attachment to Jewish religion and tradition. At
the same time, the male Jewish lineage here convoked
drew attention away from Mark’s mother, whose conversion secured the lineage in the first place. Ljudmila
Belkin’s conversion—she previously belonged to the
Russian Orthodox Church—enabled Mark to become
Jewish in accordance with Halachic law.
The Bar Mitzvah then carried the Torah scrolls through
the host of assembled guests, who wished him “Mazel
Tov.” They congratulated the whole family on reaching
this big day, and offered their best wishes to Mark,
who was now deemed an adult under Jewish law. What
followed was a lavish party with “kosher-style food,”
a film that Mark’s parents made for him featuring all
the places the family had been, from the Ukraine to
Boston, and lots of music, from Yiddish music to jazz.
When a journalist from JewishNewsOne asked the
13-year-old Mark what the Bar Mitzvah meant to him,
Mark answered confidently in English: it means he is a
man now, and feels a little older than before. By the
way: tears of emotion flowed at this party, too. Sometimes real life is just like in the movies, even when the
action takes place nowhere near Hollywood.
Karen Körber received her doctorate from the Humboldt
University Berlin with a dissertation on Russian-Jewish immigrants in East-Germany in the 1990s. As a fellow at the Academy
of the Jewish Museum Berlin she is currently researching the
prevailing reality of second-generation Jewish immigrants from
Eastern Europe.

“The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival;
he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”
Thus wrote Franz Kafka on 4 December 1917 in one of
his blue octavo notebooks.1
Kafka’s distinction between the arrival and the coming of the Messiah, between the last and the very last
day, posits a vague utopia and suggests ominously
that it will come too late. The Messianic era will begin
only when there is nothing more to redeem. Peace will
come only when the First World War shall have
destroyed everything.
Kafka’s note on the belated arrival of the Messiah
may sound cynical; but it ties in directly to talmudic
debates concerning the traces of the Messiah and the
question of when the Redeemer will ultimately come
(Tract Sanhedrin 96b–97a). While the term “Messiah“
(Hebrew: the anointed one) in the Hebrew Bible originally referred to the kings, its meaning changed in
the wake of the destruction of the First Temple and
the Babylonian exile. In the writings of the Prophets,
especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the Messiah
eventually came to mean the Chosen One of the Tribe
of David, who would rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple
and inaugurate an era of peace. In the decades immediately before and after the beginning of the Common
Era, the name finally invoked a redeemer whose arrival
would signal the commencement of Olam ha-ba
(Hebrew: the world to come). This vision, still current
today, also appears in the rabbinical literature of the
second and third centuries C.E., although the Messiah
in these texts is discussed not only as a Chosen One
among men, but also as the personification of a
blessed era, of the Yemot HaMashiach (Hebrew: days
of the Messiah).2
In contrast to Christianity, which over the centuries
has continuously claimed acquaintance with the world
to come, building upon its faith in and understanding
of Christ (Greek: Messiah), the Messiah in Judaism
represents a figure in the history of ideas which has
undergone many metamorphoses and yet always
appears to proffer the same promise: namely, that
Olam ha-zeh (Hebrew: this world) will one day be
redeemed by a just order, the Messianic era.
Franz Kafka wrote his note without the belief that
a Messiah might have been born prior to the First

World War. On the contrary, he asserted that redemption was not forthcoming, even in light of the supposed
demise of this world. He thus puts us in mind of the
following joke:
At the edge of a Hassidic village, a guard stands on a
watchtower. A traveler comes along, sees the man in
the watchtower, and asks: “Hey, what are you doing up
there?” The guard answers: “I’m keeping watch for the
Messiah!” The traveler shakes his head: “What kind of
profession is that? I hardly think you’ll catch sight of
him!“ The guard answers: “Yeah, but at least I’ll have
a secure job for the rest of my life.”3

The guard might easily have sprung from Kafka’s
arsenal of characters. His job for life bears a certain
similarity to the lifelong position which the man from
the country occupies before the gate of the law.4 It also
recalls Josef K. waiting for the official beginning of his
trial or K.’s attempts to approach the castle.
The “milieu of Kafka’s world”5 and the fleeting,
flickering life of these three characters lie under the
spell of “what is to come” and tell a tale of its failure
to appear. The greatness of the Messianic idea is here
twisted into a dystopia. Walter Benjamin characterized
this inversion as “World Theater which opens up
toward heaven.”6 He asserts that in Kafka’s stories the
‘little hunchback’ from the well-known German folk
song takes the stage, and explains further: “The little
man is at home in distorted life; he will disappear with
the coming of the Messiah, of whom a great rabbi once
said that he did not wish to change the world by force,
but would only make a slight adjustment in it.”7
The extent to which Benjamin’s own thoughts about
the Messiah were shaped by the violence of historical
events is made clear particularly in his “Theses on the
Philosophy of History.” The author here describes the
present as a catastrophe “which is shot through with
chips of Messianic time.”8
His reflections on history do not only revolve around
the ravages of the beginning Second World War, but
also draw upon concepts from the Talmud such as the
apocalyptical “birth pangs of the Messiah” (Tract

Sanhedrin 98b). They conclude with the following
addendum:
“We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them
in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of
its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the
soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply,
however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the
strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”9
Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history trace
an arc from the disenchanted future of the Modern Era
through instruction in remembrance to the strait gate
through which the Messiah might enter. They describe
Jewish tradition as a practice of reflection and the
Messiah as a figuration of the relationship between
past and future, which manifests itself in the present.
In contrast to the Hassidic view that the Messiah will
come only when the knowledge of the Zaddikim
(Hebrew: the righteous) has taken root in the world,
redemption here finds its point of departure in a secular perspective: it begins with materialist historiography, which, as Benjamin writes, knows the “temporal
index” that draws the past toward redemption, and
thus knows of the “weak Messianic power,” with which
every generation is endowed.10
The Messiah, who can step through the gates at any
moment, has in Benjamin’s writings not so much the
characteristics of the Anointed One of the Tribe of
David, who will gather the people of Israel and rebuild
the Temple. Rather, he manifests himself in a revolutionary act, which arrests the march of history: “Only
the Messiah himself consummates all history,” writes
Benjamin at the beginning of his Theologico-Political
Fragment, “in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic.”11
The Messianic era can thus, in Benjamin’s terms, be
understood as the consummation of history. It fulfills
the promise of a coming redemption and puts an end
to the writing of history and the world as we know it.
From the point of view of the entanglements in
which Kafka’s characters find themselves while they
wait for their redemption, the Messianic era appears
to lie far away indeed. The end of the story arrives in
9 Ibid.: 264
10 Ibid.: 254
11 Benjamin. Theological-Political Fragment, In: Benjamin (ed. Peter Demetz),
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken
Books, 1978: 312

lieu of redemption and seals their death. Not only this
ending, but more than anything else the life of Kafka’s
characters is marked by that “price demanded by
Messianism,” which Gershom Scholem described in the
following words:
“There is something grand about living in hope, but at
the same time there is something profoundly unreal
about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the
incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely
what constitutes its highest value. Thus in Judaism the
Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment,
in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can
be irrevocably accomplished.”12
Scholem’s discussion of the transformations undergone by the Messianic idea focused not on literary fictions, but on historical developments. They all lead to the
“utopian return to Zion,” as setting for which the author
etched the image of a “blazing landscape of redemption,”
which he understood both as historical achievement and
as imminent danger.13 Scholem asserted that “overtones
of Messianism” could be heard in the “irrevocable action
in the concrete realm,” which was being accomplished
before his very eyes in the Middle East.14
His analysis alluded not only to certain concepts
of paradigmatic significance for the identity of Israel,
such as the biblical phrase “Kibbutz Galujot” (Hebr.:
Gathering of the Exiles, Deuteronomy 30:3). His reflections also referred to the statements of Ben Gurion,
who termed Zionism a “Messianic Movement,” which
made an ancient dream come true.15
Franz Kafka was theoretically open to the utopia of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine, but made many critical
statements concerning its realization. In the story
“Jackals and Arabs,” written in 1917, he depicts what
Scholem would call “blazing landscape of redemption”
as a horror scenario, characterized by murder and
manslaughter:
During a rest on his journey, a first-person narrator
travelling through the desert is surrounded by jackals.
The jackals identify him as the Messiah, for whom they
have been waiting for generations. With the words
12 Gershom Scholem. The Messianic Idea in Judaism: and Other Essays on Jewish
Spirituality. London: Allen & Unwin, 1971: 35
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Cf. David Ohana. Political Theologies in the Holy Land. Israeli Messianism and its
critics. New York: Routledge, 2010: 17–53
16 Kafka. Jackals and Arabs. In: Kafka, The Penal Colony. Stories and Short Pieces.
New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers, 2000: 133

“Sir, we want you to end this quarrel that divides the
world,”16 they furnish him with a rusty pair of scissors
and insist that he cut the throat of his guides. When
an Arab becomes aware of the situation, he scares the
animals away on the spot and throws them a dead
camel to eat.
Kafka wrote this short story in the same year as
the so-called Balfour Declaration was published, which
spoke out in favor of creating a Jewish polity within
the British Mandate of Palestine. “Jackals and Arabs”
does not just foretell the violence destined to accompany the history of the creation of the Jewish State;
it denounces the Zionist enterprise as a death squad.
The story imagines what would occur if travelers were
to heed the appeals of the jackals and declare themselves to be the Messiah, taking history into their own
hands. It refers, hypothetically, to the circumstances
then prevailing and moreover recalls to mind the
Messiah's various entrances through the gates of history: the traces left by the Christian Crusades, like the
historical circumstances surrounding the emergence
of Shabbtai Zvi and his attempt to alter Jewish history,
are rife with violence. As a reflection on the violence of
Messianic history, Kafka's story anticipates a particular
answer to the question: “Why has the Messiah not yet
come to Israel?” “Because it is too dangerous there.” 17
Mirjam Wenzel is a literary scholar and Head of the Media
Department at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Her publications
include the book “Gericht und Gedächtnis. Der deutschsprachige
Holocaust-Diskurs der sechziger Jahre” (Justice and Memory.
The German Holocaust Discourse in the 1960s), Wallstein:
Göttingen 2009.

A Time for Everything
Rituals Against Forgetting
The exhibition “A Time for Everything” was inspired by the famous passage from the Jewish
Book of Wisdom, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, which
begins with the words: “For everything there is
a season, and a time for every matter under
heaven.” 1 It is possible to interpret this text,
which describes the cycle of life in 14 contrasting verse pairings, with the British rabbi
Jonathan Magonet, as a wrestling with time,
“to be able to make sense of the endless cycles
and repetitions.”1
“A Time for Everything” displays over 50 objects to present rituals that help us in this
search for meaning. These rituals are embedded
in the lunisolar Jewish calendar, which begins
with the creation of the world. Calendar time is
a profane measure of time. The procedure of
cyclically recurring religious rituals, in contrast,
harmonizes with the heavenly liturgy and represents a sacred measure of time. Each time we
carry out a religious ritual, we overcome the
profane measure of time and take part in the
holy time. Thus, for example, the practice of
Shabbat reflects by analogy God’s day of rest:
God’s holiday in the creation legend becomes
man’s holiday, who thus enters into direct relation with the process of creation.
The annual cycle of Jewish religious rituals
embeds worldly events in a mythical time, which
we memorialize. The historian Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi explained these rituals with the
words: “If there can be no return to Sinai, then
what took place at Sinai must be borne along
the conduits of memory to those who were not

ACCO M PA N Y I N G P RO G RA M
T H U R S DAY, 3 D EC E M B E R 20 1 3, 7 P M ,
O L D B U I L D I N G, G R E AT H A L L
A D M I SS I O N : F R E E
C H R I ST M AS A N D OT H E R CO U N T I N GS
A N D ACCO U N T I N GS
Lecture by Rabbi Daniel Katz
Rabbi Daniel Katz talks about Christian
and Jewish holiness and holidays, about
the rituals that make up religious festivals
and their development through time. What
if the Christians celebrated Yom Kippur,
and what if we based our common time
accounting on the birthdays of other
V.I.P.s? And, last but not least, he addresses the central question of what religion
and soccer have in common.

there that day.” 3 By presenting those rituals
which refer to the reconstruction of a common
religious experience, the exhibition attempts to
point out the tension between history and collective memory.
Besides religiously anchored collective rituals,
the exhibition also presents individualized rituals. Individuals, too, require recurring reminders
which confirm their connection to a culture or
religion and national identity—and confirm their
own identity. Coming of age and marriage, birth
and death, the annual birthday, wedding
anniversary, or date on which a loved one died—
these are remembered year after year with festivity or mourning, because they belong to the
self, define the self, and therefore must not be
forgotten.
The exhibition also addresses secular rituals of
remembrance. These strategies against forgetting include, today, especially the remembrance
of National Socialism and the Holocaust. These
commemorations, as practiced by both Jews
and non-Jews, are highly ritualized: the key
dates of collective remembrance are: 9 th of
November, the day of the 1938 pogrom (in
Germany); 27th of January, the day on which the
concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was
liberated by the Red Army (internationally); and
27 th of Nissan (April/May), memorializing the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (in Israel).
Moreover, the exhibition pays special attention
to a group of victims largely ignored by the
public days of remembrance relating
to the Holocaust: that of women
who were sexually abused in concentration camps. In the area
“Remembering the Taboo,” we
show works by the American
artist Quintan Ana Wikswo, who
has created a ritual against
forgetting by photographing
and filming over the course
of several weeks the former
site of the “special building” in Dachau used as
a concentration camp
bordello.

The women forced to become sex slaves were
transported from the concentration camp in
Ravensbrück to Dachau. The building in which
they were abused and degraded was torn down.
Wikswo’s photographs show spaces that are
empty in more ways than one. The cameras
Wikswo used for her pictures were built for Agfa
by forced laborers in the women’s concentration
camp in Ravensbrück. That history, too, is
impossible to capture in a photograph. And yet
the artist succeeds in evoking this history with
her veiled photographs. Her pictures show that
which is absent, that which is not documented.
It is precisely by focusing, as she does, on the
attempt to make history forget these women’s
stories, that the artist creates a memorial to
sexual violence and forced labor under the Nazi
regime. A selection of Wikswo’s photographs
and short texts, together with one of her films,
create a powerful complement to our “Calendar
of Remembrance.”
Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek
1 See page 13 of this JMB Journal
2 Jonathan Magonet. From Autumn to Summer. A Biblical Journey
through the Jewish Year. Norwich: SCM Press 2000, p. 23
3 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,
New York 1982, p. 10

In an Instant
Photographs by Fred Stein
One moment can be decisive—in life and in photography. For the photographer Fred Stein, it was
precisely these short moments which shaped
his life, both personally and professionally.
Born in 1909 as the son of a rabbi in Dresden,
the ardent socialist Fred Stein was compelled to
give up his position as a lawyer, leave Germany,
and completely re-orient his life after the
National Socialists seized power. In 1933, under
the pretext of traveling on honeymoon, he was
able to emigrate with his wife Lilo to Paris. Their
joint wedding present, a Leica camera, paved
the path of their future; and what was a hobby
became a calling.
Once in Paris, the young couple succeeded in
establishing a photo studio. They shared the
darkroom built within a former bathroom in their
apartment at various times with other photographers, such as Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.
After a short time, Fred Stein exhibited his photos,
some alongside famous photographers like
Brassaï, Man Ray, Dora Maar, and André Kertész.
In 1941, the couple was forced to flee once more—
now with their young daughter. They reached
New York on one of the last ships from France.
They had packed negatives and a few selected
prints in their luggage. Stein continued his work
as photographer in the USA, using a Rolleiflex in
addition to the Leica. The easy handling enabled
Stein to use these 35mm cameras to express his
vision of what photography was about: capturing the short, but decisive moment.
In contrast to other photographers, Fred Stein

did not work in the studio, but on the city
streets. His pictures—street views as well as portraits—are informed by a humanistic ideal. In
professional appointments, picture-taking often
gave way to long and heated discussions. One
telling snapshot at the end of their meeting was
the result. Stein’s pictures are not embellished
or artfully composed: Thomas Mann with serious demeanor at his desk; Hermann Hesse enervated and vulnerable on a low brick wall; Egon
Erwin Kisch with hat, overcoat, and cigarette;
Hannah Arendt before and after her testimony
in the Eichmann Trial; these are examples of the
1,200 portraits that form his legacy.
The Jewish Museum Berlin has put together the
first comprehensive retrospective of Fred Stein’s
work in Germany, exhibiting over 150 photographs and making Stein’s multi-faceted œuvre
accessible to a broad public.
Theresia Ziehe and Jihan Radjai

Tonalities
Jewish Women Ceramicists from Germany
after 1933
In the early 20th century, women in Germany
were finally finding acceptance and visibility in
the male-dominated field of art. Yet they were
still largely sidelined to the applied arts, such as
textile design, graphic design and ceramics.
With the rise of the National Socialist regime in
the 1930s, Jewish women applied artists were
among those whose work possibilities and
means of independent existence were threatened. Some had the foresight to leave Germany
and their timely exits saved their lives.
The exhibition “Tonalities” follows several
women in their search to find both a place and
an artistic voice in the countries to which they
emigrated. These women demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of inevitable setbacks
and in their determination to survive financially,
living from their craft.
Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein (later Marks)

was a well-known ceramics designer and cofounder of the successful Haël ceramic workshop
in Velten, around 25 miles north of Berlin. She
utilized radical, bold, modernistic forms and vivid
glazes. In 1933, she was denounced by the local
National Socialist group for “subversive activities.” Shortly thereafter, she decided to sell her
company. Haël was sold, well below its value, to
an NSDAP member who invited the young Hedwig
Bollhagen to take over as artistic director of the
workshops. Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein
left her German homeland to begin a new life in
Great Britain, where she arrived with high hopes,
but was unable to repeat the huge success that
she had experienced in Germany.
Other Jewish women, who left Germany in the
1930s, settled in Palestine for both ideological
and pragmatic reasons. Trained in Germany, the
emigrant ceramics designers brought their
technical expertise with them. Moreover, they
had the willingness to address the challenges of
life in a new environment, which included foreign languages, cultures and art traditions. In
Palestine, a modern ceramics industry had not
yet been developed and Jewish art ceramics
were non-existent, although the British had
made many innovations since their arrival in
1918. The establishment of Palestine as a tourist
destination planted the seeds of a souvenir
industry, which would ultimately provide potters
with a source of income. Women would also find
creative roles in the industrial production of
domestic ceramics.
Hedwig Grossmann from Berlin, Hanna CharagZuntz from Hamburg and Eva Samuel from Essen
are considered the founding mothers of modern
Israeli art ceramics. By contrast, Margarete
Marks’s work in England, where she lived and
worked from 1936 until her death in 1990, has
gone unrecognized. This exhibition looks at the
work of these refugee and pioneering women
and at the influence of German ceramic traditions in the emerging State of Israel.
Michal Friedlander

On Trial:
Auschwitz / Majdanek
The area in our permanent exhibition devoted
to “contemporary” themes now focuses on the
two biggest and most public Nazi trials in the
history of post-war Germany: the Frankfurt
Auschwitz trial (1963–1965) and the Dusseldorf
Majdanek trial (1975–1981).
These trials mark turning points in the way the
public dealt with Germany’s Nazi past. In the
Auschwitz trial—18 years after the end of the
war—former members of the staff overseeing a
concentration camp stood on trial for murder
for the first time in a German court. Over the
course of the 20-month-long trial, German and
international media reported more than ever
before on the systematically planned and willingly carried out mass murder of the European
Jews. The aggressive courtroom appearances
of the unrepenting defendants made it clear
that responsibility for the Nazi crimes could not
be ascribed exclusively—as was generally held in
Germany up to that time—to the top leaders of
the National Socialist regime. The witness statements made by 211 former prisoners received
much publicity. Germany’s four largest newspapers—Die Welt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the
Frankfurter Rundschau—published nearly 1,000
articles during the 20 months in which the trial
was running.
Television, still a relatively new medium, broadcasted from the courtroom. A selection of
historic television programs from Germany,
the Netherlands, and Canada show the storm of
discussion over responsibility and forgetting

unleashed by the Auschwitz trial. Excerpts from
interviews with the prosecutor Joachim Kügler,
the translator Wera Kapkajew, and defendant
Franz Lucas, a concentration camp doctor,
shed light on the trial proceedings, as do the
statements of international trial observers,
including Hannah Arendt and the journalist
Bernd Naumann.
The Majdanek trial shows to what extent the
German justice system was incapable of exacting adequate retribution for the Nazi crimes
over a decade later. Our exhibition approaches
this trial—regularly described as “monstrous” by
contemporaries—through the 44 paintings in
Minka Hauschild’s Majdanek Trial series, which
portray various people involved in the trial.
Hauschild was inspired by the documentary film
Der Prozess (“The Trial”) by Eberhard Fechner,
which compiled interviews of the defendants,
witnesses, lawyers, journalists, and other trial
participants to form an impressive collage of
interviews. The roles played by the people portrayed in Hauschild’s paintings can be viewed on
interactive tablet computers in the exhibition.
Individual stories are spotlights illuminating the
Majdanek trial. The experience of the Polish witness Henryka Ostrowska, for instance, is indicative of the tactics used by defense counsel in
the Majdanek trial: Ostrowska testified in
Dusseldorf against the former concentration
camp warden Hidegard Lächert. When she
described, from the witness stand, how she was
forced to bring containers of Cyclon B to the gas
chambers, Lächert’s defense lawyer demanded
imprisonment. He argued that her witness testimony constituted a confession that she acted as
an accessory to murder. The court denied his
motion. But the defense lawyer achieved his
aim: for Henryka Ostrowska was no longer willing to testify as witness. She called the courtroom a theater in which she had no part, and
returned to Warsaw.
After a five-and-a-half-year trial, the outcome
was mainly acquittals and a few mild sentences.
The court found that only the defendant
Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan displayed the criminal intent requisite to be convicted of murder.

This former vice chief warden of the women’s
concentration camp in Majdanek had met an
American man in the 1950s and emigrated to
the United States. Simon Wiesenthal finally discovered her in New York, and succeeded in having her extradited, after a year-long battle, to
the Federal Republic of Germany. In the
Majdanek trial, several former prisoners testified that she had brutally dragged or thrown
infants and small children onto the trucks that
would take them to be murdered in gas chambers during the so-called “children’s offensive.”
Hermine Braunsteiner was the only defendant
to receive a life-long sentence. There were
vociferous protests against the inadequately
mild judgments and sentencing—not only in
Germany, but internationally. The lenient penalties were seen as an insult to the victims. A need
for new, extra-judicial paths were sought to
compel Nazi-officials to accept responsibility for
their crimes.
This new chapter in our exhibition shows the
leading role which the justice system played in
generating public debate in Germany on the
Holocaust. But it also shows how the criminal
prosecution of Nazi crimes ultimately failed,
producing inadequate and even shameful outcomes. More important than the final judgements, however, was the resonance which these
trials found in the media and public consciousness. This resonance can still be felt today.
Monika Flores Martínez

At the Anniversary Dinner of the Jewish Museum
Berlin on 16 November 2013, the museum will
award its 12th Prize for Understanding and
Tolerance. With this annual prize the Jewish
Musuem Berlin, together with the Society of
Friends and Sponsors of the Jewish Museum,
honors individuals from the fields of business,
culture, and politics who have made a significant contribution to Germany’s recognition of
its historic responsibility, to the dignity of man,
and to the dialog among cultures and religions.
This year, the prize will go to Iris Berben and
Berthold Leibinger.

clandestine notes of victims of the Holocaust.
Thereby, she has heightened historical awareness and combated the inclination to forget. As
ambassador for the “Raum der Namen” (Room
of Names), moreover, she played an important
role in supporting the Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe.
Since her first visit in the 1960s, Iris Berben has
felt a close affinity to Israel. She supports the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, through the
Iris Berben Fund for Research on the Brain,
which she founded.
Iris Berben has received many awards, not only
for her work as an actress, but also for her political activism. Among others, she has received
the Merit Cross 1st Class of the Federal Republic
of Germany—and the Leo Baeck Prize of the
Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Berben has been a guest of the Jewish Museum
Berlin on many occasions. Most recently in 2012,
she participated in our book presentation of “Ist
es Freude, ist es Schmerz?” (Is it Joy? Is it
Pain?), an anthology of German-Jewish poetry.

Iris Berben
Berthold Leibinger
Iris Berben is one of Germany’s most popular
actresses. She made her debut on screen at age
18 in the film “Detektive” (Detectives). A year
later, in 1969, she made her first television
appearance in “Brandstifter” (Arsonist). In the
many films which followed, she captured the
hearts of her audience. Most recently, in
October, she received widespread praise as
detective superintendent Rosa Roth, when the
final episode of this long-standing series of television movies was broadcasted.
Born in 1950 in Detmold, Berben has promoted
tolerance and peaceful co-existence through
her support of the foundation “Gesicht zeigen!
Für ein weltoffenes Deutschland” (Show your
face! For a Germany that is open to the world).
Moreover, she has kept the memory of the Nazi
Regime alive through readings and podium discussions. In one, for instance, she contrasted
excerpts from the diaries of Anne Frank and
Joseph Goebbels or (in 2004) “Hitler’s Table
Talks from the Leader’s Headquarters” with the

The businessman and philanthropist Berthold
Leibinger was born in 1930 in Stuttgart as the
son of an art dealer. After high school, in 1950,
he took a position as trainee with the machinebuilding firm Trumpf & Co. After acquiring his
university degree in mechanical engineering and
spending two years in the USA, he returned to
the firm and remained faithful to it all his life.
Moreover, he began to acquire stock in the firm
on the basis of the patents he developed. Today,
Trumpf is owned by the Leibinger family. It is one
of the most important machine-building companies in the world and market leader in the fields
of industrial lasers and laser systems. It owes its
success to the work of Berthold Leibinger, who
was always ready and willing to explore new and
unusual paths. Due to this curiosity, he likes to
explore the countries in which his products are
sold and cherishes their culture.
Leibinger’s knowledge and innovational
strength were very helpful during his time as

President of the Chamber of Commerce and
Industry for the region of Stuttgart (1985–90), as
President of the German Engineering Federation
(1990–92), and as Vice Chairman of the German
Machine Tool Builders (1990–2008). In 1994, he
was appointed Chairman of the Council for
Innovation for the Government of BadenWürttemberg and, in the years following, was a
member of the Council for Research,
Technology, and Innovation. From 2003 to 2011,
Berthold Leibinger was chairman of the University Council at the University of Stuttgart, and
from 2008 to 2011 a member of the Senate
Committee of the National Academy of Science
and Engineering.
Time and again, Berthold Leibinger has emphasized that culture is an invaluable element of coexistence. Prosperity is impossible without
culture. For this reason, this entrepreneur and
recipient of countless awards, including the
Grand Merit Cross with Star of the Federal
Republic of Germany, deposited a part of his
wealth into a charitable foundation. The
Berthold Leibinger Foundation supports and
promotes culture, science, church, and social
causes. Cultural core areas are music and literature as well as history, in particular the Nazi
Regime and the history of technology.
Institutions the Foundation has supported
include, for example, the Jerusalem Foundation
Germany, the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
(University of Jewish Studies) in Heidelberg, the
Nuremberg Institute for Holocaust Studies, and
the Foundation “Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie” (Against Forgetting–For Democracy).
Projects it has supported include, among others, the publication series “Bibliothek verbrannter Bücher” (Library of Burned Books) of the
Moses Mendelssohn Center, the Jewish Museum
in Buttenhausen, several concentration camp
memorial sites in Baden-Württemberg, and the
Jüdische Kulturwochen der Israelitischen
Religionsgemeinschaft Württemberg (Jewish
Cultural Festival of the Israelite Religious
Community of Württemberg).
Christine Marth, Marie Naumann

The Academy Programs
Migration and Diversity
On 29 May 2013, the television network ARD, in
a talk show hosted by Anne Will, discussed
“Allah’s Warriors in the West—How Dangerous
are Radical Muslims?” This program was
remarkable not only because of its stigmatizing
title. The day the show aired also happened to
be the twentieth anniversary of the date on
which arsonists in Solingen, acting on racist
motives, attacked the house of a Muslim family
from Turkey. Five people, including three children, died in the fire. This event—like the arson
perpetrated in Mölln a year earlier and the
pogrom-like attacks on migrant workers and
asylum seekers in Rostock-Lichtenhagen and
Hoyerswerda—was emblazoned on the collective
memory of many immigrant communities. In the
broader historical consciousness, however,
these events are apparently less well memorialized. How else would it be possible for Anne
Will’s editorial team to have chosen such a subject for this anniversary, and for the show to air
without producing any public outcry?
As this example shows, Germany thus far lacks a
culture of mutual remembrance which adequately includes the history and experiences of
immigrants. How did they—migrant workers,
political refugees, illegalized immigrants—come
to the Federal Republic of Germany or to the
GDR? What were their living conditions like
when they arrived? What were their experiences here, and how do these experiences continue to impact subsequent generations? These
and other questions are the focus of the new
programs on migration and diversity being

developed by the Academy of the Jewish
Museum Berlin.
With the Academy programs, the museum is
expanding its previous range of core topics. The
new area deals in particular with Germany’s
identity as an immigration country and the
concomitant pluralization of society. Taking the
museum’s mission of addressing the history
and culture of Germany’s Jewish minority as a
starting point, the Academy wants to offer a
space for the perspectives of other religious
and ethnic minorities. Our programs will not
only focus on the relationship between the
majority population and Germany’s various
minorities, but also seek particularly to
strengthen exchanges and networking among
the minority groups.
With various events—seminars, workshops,
summer schools—the Academy will moreover
create a platform for sending out new impulses
in the debates surrounding integration and participation. This is due to the fact that German
integration policies are frequently based on an
outdated paradigm: that of a homogeneous
society into which immigrants must be integrated. Germany, however, already contains a pluralistic society shaped by transnational migration.
Its borders are open within the European Union,
and are crossed regularly by streams of immigration from areas outside the EU. People immigrate and emigrate. The population is pluralistic,
multi-religious, and multi-ethnic. In urban
centers, hybrid identities are the rule, not
the exception. What we need, therefore, is to
develop a new understanding of what it means
to be German, which adequately reflects these
social realities.
Such considerations show us that we need a discussion about a new terminology and new concepts that will help strengthen the participation
of ethnic and religious minorities in German
society and make it possible to deal with conflicts constructively. The Academy programs
offer experts a forum for the exchange of innovative ideas and approaches to migration
research. A first event of this kind will be held in
November of this year in cooperation with the

Migration Council (Rat für Migration). Scholars
will debate the question of whether the classical
notion of integration remains valid in an era of
post-national orders and the increasing diversification of immigration patterns; and the question of what terms or what policies might take
its place. In a follow-up podium discussion,
scholars will compare thoughts with politicians:
following the federal parliamentary elections,
we plan to host a discussion involving political
decision-makers on the question of what a
sustainable new policy on immigration and
integration in Germany might look like.
The Academy’s programs, however, will not only
foster critical reflection on current debates over
integration in Germany, it will also present the
results of international scholarly research to a
broader public. Germany has only recently
come to view itself as an immigration country.
By contrast, classical immigration countries like
the USA and Canada have gathered decadelong experience in the development of policies
to combat discrimination and foster equal
opportunity. We are particularly interested in
examining which lessons from that experience
can be profitably applied to the German context.
The Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin will
address this question in December in cooperation with the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation and the
British Council. Our conference on “Social
Exclusion and Politics of Anti-Discrimination
and Minority Empowerment in Europe and the
United States” will invite representatives of
NGOs active in this field, as well as other interested persons, to participate in a transatlantic
exchange of ideas and experiences.
Yasemin Shooman

O P E N H O U S E AT T H E AC A D E M Y
27 O C TO B E R 20 1 3, 1 1 A M — 5 P M
A D M I SS I O N F R E E
On Open House Day at the Academy of the Jewish
Museum Berlin, we will open our doors and let the public
peruse our archives, shelves, and climate chambers.
We look forward to a diverse program: dig up treasures
in our archives and library, take part in a discussion
with a witness of history, and get to know authors and
illustrators featured in our book week “Multifaceted.”
Explore our new building—or the history of the south
end of historic Friedrichstadt—in a guided tour through
the Academy or the streets of Berlin. And of course, you
can also get an impression of the Academy programs
on migration and diversity by attending a discussion
called: “But your German is very good?”—with Lena
Gorelik, Yasemin Shooman, and Karen Körber—which
inaugurates a new series of discussions called “New
German [Hi]stories.”

Childrens’ Book Week
From 21–27 October 2013, the Academy of the
Jewish Museum Berlin in cooperation with
kulturkind e. V. will host readings, workshops, a
podium discussion, and an open house day for
the public under the rubric of “Multifaceted. A
book week on diversity in children’s and young
adult literature.” We have invited authors, illustrators, translators, and publishers to come and
present their books. Over the past months, staff
members from various Museum departments
read, discussed, and selected a large number of
books on the theme of diversity. These books
propose that diversity in German society is not
limited to ethnic and cultural origins or religious
affiliation, but extends today and in the forseeable future to family constellations, sexual orientation, age, and gender. In contrast to the
discussions currently being held on racism in
the classics of children’s and young adult literature, we deliberately chose not to focus on the
problematic aspects of well-known books.
Instead, we sought new books that deal with the
subjects of migration, homosexuality, and multilingual environments.
Finding books on these subjects which can be
recommended without reserve was not easy. A
lot of stories have a complicated structure and
lifeless characters because their authors gave
priority to pedagogical goals at the cost of narrative cohesion. The result is often a book which
might be labelled “non-discriminatory education,” but which is not compelling, and so fails to
inspire young people to read. Many books, while
well intentioned, nevertheless reinforce clichés
and prejudices, rather than dispel, question, or

contradict them. Some books of this kind are
even expressly recommended for teaching in
school, despite depicting Romany as lazy beggars and referring to them as “gypsies.” Other
stories reflect unquestioningly the typically
European cliché of Africa as a land of village
schools swamped by mud, of war-painted
dancers, and overflowing buses, without taking
into consideration that Africa is a huge continent with many different languages, countries,
and ways of life.
We looked instead for books that present new
perspectives and do not explicitly explain the
“foreign,” but simply treat it as a perfectly natural part of the world we live in. We looked for
texts that do not speak about “others,” but
rather let them speak for themselves. And we
found quite a lot of books that reflect the diversity of people living in Germany today in a very
entertaining and original way. They tell of patchwork and rainbow families, of asylum-seekers in
Germany, of animal and human language confusion, of street children, of religious diversity in
everyday life, of soccer and friendship. And
these books describe the lives of people whose
experiences have seldom been seen at centerstage in a story—like those of East European
immigrant workers or supposedly invisible “illegal
immigrants.”
After making our selection, we put together a
brochure that presents altogether 30 picture
books, books for children and young adults, and

graphic novels, each with a short descriptive
text, and recommends 20 more books. Several
books have already been reviewed in our blog
on the JMB website.
Within the framework of our book week in
October, Diana Dressel and Nina Wilkens will
hold a discussion with the children’s and young
adults’ book author Mirjam Pressler, with
Maisha-Maureen Eggers, Professor of Childhood
and Difference, and with Felix Giesa, from the
Center for Children’s and Young-Adult Media
Research from the Cologne University, on the
questions of what makes for a successful literary representation of diversity, what benefits
can be expected from presenting diversity in
children’s and young adults’ literature, and what
problems arise in this context. In a continuing
education course for teachers and other interested persons, we will present and discuss our
criteria for books on diversity, as well as discuss
the broader question of what makes a good
book. At the heart of our book week are the
many readings and workshops for schoolchildren and students of all ages that will take place
in the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin.
For this series, we have invited the authors
Aygen-Sibel Çelik, Mirjam Pressler, Nasrin Siege,
and Michael Stavariˇc ; translator Gesine
Strempel; illustrators Barbara Nascimbeni and
Barbara Steinitz; and publishers Myriam
Halberstam and Stephan Trudewind.
Mariette Franz, Nina Wilkens

The exhibition “The Whole Truth … everything
you always wanted to know about Jews,” generated a lot of questions. We put a few of these to
the guests of our summer party in a quiz show—
would you have known the answers?

6. How many people live in
Kibbutzim today?
a) over 100 000
b) over 200 000
c) fewer than 50 000

Mazel Tov!

12. Afikoman is …
a) a young Jew who is primed from childhood to become a rabbi.
b) the bread (matzoh), which is hidden by
children during the Passover seder.
c) a non-Jew who is hired to turn lights on
and off during Shabbat.

7. Men and women: in traditional
Judaism, both should …
1. With what event does the Jewish
Calendar begin?
a) the birth of the prophet Elijah
b) the exodus from Egypt
c) the creation of the world

10. Judaism is generally viewed as a …
4. The man generally viewed as the
most important Jewish theologian is …
a) Shabbtai Zvi.
b) Moses Maimonides.
c) Moses Mendelssohn.

a) religion of conscience.
b) religion of laws.
c) mystical religion.

15. What is unconditionally required
to celebrate a religious service?
a) a synagogue
b) ten Jewish men
c) matzoh

16. Who entered into a covenant with
God, promising no longer to believe
in many gods, but in one God?
a) Moses
b) Abraham
c) Adam

11. What is a Mamzer?

a) Jerusalem
b) New York
c) Tel Aviv

a) a child born illegitimately pursuant to
Jewish law
b) the person who will be first to learn of the
arrival of the Messiah
c) a man who is still living with his mother at
age 39

17. In the list of countries with large
populations of Jews, where does
Germany stand?
a) third place after Israel and the USA
b) eighth place after Russia and Argentina
c) fifth place after France and Canada

In spring 2014, the Jewish Museum Berlin will host the German
premiere of “Defiant Requiem.” This concert drama was put together
by the American conductor Murry Sidlin and is dedicated to the Czech
conductor and pianist Rafael Schächter.
Rafael Schächter was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1941.
While there, he prepared a performance of Verdi’s Requiem with
other prisoners. At first, they performed clandestinely; but later, the
National Socialists exploited their performances for the purposes of
propaganda. The orchestra’s final concert was held on 23 June 1944
for SS-Officers and a delegation from the International Red Cross, in
order to present Theresienstadt to the outside world as a well-organized camp under Jewish self-government. At that point, more than
half of the orchestra’s original musicians had died in the Ghetto or
been deported to Auschwitz. The 60 musicians who remained were
likewise sent to the death camp shortly after their final performance.
As a memorial to these victims of Nazi terror, the American conductor Sidlin accompanies Verdi’s Requiem with film footage and reports
or interviews with survivors of Theresienstadt.

Medieval documents, artfully executed marriage contracts, richly
illustrated scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, and valuable prints: the
spectacular collection that René Braginsky assembled over the course of three decades shows just how important written reproductions
of the holy texts and biblical commentary have been for Judaism.
Moreover, they provide evidence as to how the prohibition on graven
images in Jewish tradition was interpreted and circumvented in
different periods of history.
Torah scribes and calligraphers will demonstrate their skill during the
exhibition and invite visitors to try their hand at writing in this tradition.
After exhibitions in Amsterdam, New York, Jerusalem, and Zurich,
the Jewish Museum Berlin will show 150 highlights from the
Braginsky Collection in Germany for the first time.

Time, as this issue of the JMB Journal attests, is a rather elusive
concept. Grasping concrete moments of it is never enough to capture it entirely. Holiness is a concept as elusive as time. How could
we speak of both together without finding ourselves chasing after
thin air? Might it be in fact that that is what we are trying to
grasp? That very thing which is not a thing, a ‘palace in time’ (to
quote the profound Abraham Joshua Heschel when talking about
Shabbat) which celebrates its victory over thingness (Dingwelt)?
Let us begin cautiously, by examining first the boundaries of
the Shabbat, the rites de passage which delineate this holy time.
The immediate rites of passage which define the starting
and ending points of Shabbat are the Kiddush and the Havdalah,
which when translated yield the rite of sanctification and the
rite of setting apart. Indeed, when the greatest Jewish exegete
of medieval times, Rashi, comments on the commandment
“You shall be holy for I YHWH your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2)
he expounds: “You shall be holy—you shall be set apart.” The
primary feature of holiness is setting apart something from the
regular order of things. This, however, seems like too general a
classification of the holy. Is setting apart, distinguishing and declaring a difference enough to render something holy? Let us be
reminded of the anthropologists who insist on linking the holy
and the taboo under one category. Both are set apart and separated by allegedly well-defined boundaries. Both signal danger for
those who dare and come too close. Setting apart then, is a necessary condition for holiness, but it is certainly not a sufficient
one. It seems that the holy needs a certain set of values to be
attached to it, not only difference per se, in order to be holy, and
not just different or untouchable. Before looking into other conditions for the holy in general and holy time in specific, we must
nevertheless remain with the separation mechanisms a little
longer. How can one set apart one moment of time from another?
When facing the abstract, and especially the holy abstract,
Jewish law concretizes. In marriage, we mark the metaphysical
change which binds two people to each other in a holy covenant,
the Kiddushin, by a blessing on a very concrete object—wine. Unlike
the catholic sacramentum—the wine in a Jewish sanctification
ritual is not meant to serve as an incarnation of the divine; it is

rather utilized as a vehicle on which we can move from one nonmaterial reality to another—from singlehood to marriage, and in
our case from “Alltag” to Shabbat. By blessing the wine, we set
apart the holy day from all others. Lighting the candles, originally
just a way of making sure there will be enough light for the
Shabbat eve dinner, carries a similar function to the wine nowadays. It marks the beginning of different time by a very physical
and human action, that of lighting fire.
The Havdalah, on the other hand, necessitates more than just
wine. In the Havdalah we also light a candle and inhale some kind
of scentful herb. Leaving the realm of holiness and re-entering
the profane has a mini-scale carnivalistic character to it—we celebrate with smell, eyesight (of the fire) and taste together. The late
20th century Jewish mystic, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook,
used to go further, and smoke his weekly pipe right after the
Havdalah, claiming that that is the right time to make a small
gesture to the lustful parts of the personality. Why is that?
Perhaps holy time is not only a differentiated time, but also
a time belonging to a different order. The components of the
Havdalah show by way of contrast that in that other order, some
things are prohibited, in order to make room for a different kind
of relationship between the human psyche and the sensual and
concrete. With this in mind, let us return again to the definition of
the holy, and look at it from a different angle, that of otherness
(and not only of separation.)
Let us try anew. Another essential characterization of the holy
is that it cannot belong to anyone. The holy cannot be purchased, it
cannot be owned. In fact, it is completely alien to commerce altogether. When an artifact which once belonged to the realm of the
holy is out for sale, either as art or as folklore or as archeology,
we know it is no longer holy. It has been secularized. A. J. Heschel
understands its holiness in precisely this way. Human possession
of things in the world, human dominance over nature, is a form of
subordination. Technology is such a subordination at its peak:
“Technical civilization is the product of labor, of man’s exertion of power for
the sake of gain, for the sake of producing goods. It begins when man, dissatisfied with what is available in nature, becomes engaged in a struggle with the
forces of nature in order to enhance his safety and to increase his comfort.

To use the language of the Bible, the task of civilization is to subdue the earth,
to have dominion over the beast.“ (Heschel, p. 27)

But the Shabbat sets a person free from his/her subordination
to the process of subordinating the universe. The holiness of the
Shabbat consists in that it not only refuses ownership, but also
abolishes the notion of human ownership altogether. It enables
humans to step outside of their very wish to subordinate:
“To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use
the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar,
of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping
the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of
armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of
nature—is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man's
progress than the Sabbath?“ (Heschel, p. 28)

Quite easily we can see that for Heschel, all things are ultimately unholy—space (“the earth” in the terms of Genesis) and
whatever is included in it is given to man for dominion. Only time
can escape the claws of commerce and civilization. Only time, in a
final account, can truly be as holy as God, for both are not a thing.
To sum up thus far—we began with the Shabbat as a time set
apart, observing that separation is a central organ of the holy body.
When scrutinizing the separation rituals of the Shabbat, Kiddush
and Havdalah, it seemed that they convey more than just an arbitrary threshold, and point to the otherness of that time, the holy
time. Combining that with the notion that we can never own the
holy, for it is precisely that which cannot be reduced to becoming
a commercial good, the Shabbat appeared before us as a window
to a different mode of humanity—one which refrains from conquering and is liberated by this refrain. Now is the time to look at both
versions of the fifth commandment on the Shabbat and move from
the otherness of holy time to the place of the other within it.
Of the twenty four books of the Hebrew Bible, seventeen include
an explicit and many times elaborated mention of the Shabbat. Its
centrality is fixed already in the story of Genesis, where the divine
act of creation culminates in God’s blessing of the seventh day and
His rest on it. Various commandments on the observance of the
Shabbat are scattered throughout the Pentateuch, creating an intricate tapestry which occupies the sages of Jewish law to this day.

But we shall limit our textual attention only to the two versions of
the Commandment on the Shabbat in the ten commandments—one
in Exodus, the other in Deuteronomy. And so read the two versions:
7

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 8Six days shalt thou labour, and do
all thy work; 9but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the LORD thy God, in it
thou shalt not do any manner of work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor
thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is
within thy gates; 10for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea,
and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day; wherefore the LORD
blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. (Exodus 20:7-10)
Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD thy God commanded
thee. 13Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; 14but the seventh day is a
sabbath unto the LORD thy God, in it thou shalt not do any manner of work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is
within thy gates; that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well
as thou. 15And thou shalt remember that thou was a servant in the land of
Egypt, and the LORD thy God brought thee out thence by a mighty hand and
by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to
keep the sabbath day. (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)
12

Exodus commands to remember, Deuteronomy to observe. This
is an important distinction. But for our interest, it is the latter part
of the commandment that merits another look. Why are we to observe the Shabbat? Exodus states clearly: “for in six days the LORD
made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested
on the seventh day; wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day,
and hallowed it.” The holiness of the Shabbat signals here towards
the ultimate other. The day is holy, and therefore worthy of special
conduct because God made it holy, and God made it holy because
it was His day of refraining from labor. When refraining from labor
then, we somehow simulate the divine rest which completed creation. Plausibly, the commandment implies that this similitude of the
divine rest is, to a certain measure, a path for the human to become
similar to God. Recall the verse mentioned above from Leviticus 19,
commanding us to be holy for He is holy. By observing God’s holy
time, we somehow enter His ‘palace in time’ (using Heschel’s words),
in imitating his lack of action, we are more like him, somehow.
But how? How can a human be like God? In what way does
observing the Shabbat make us more divine, and what does that
tell us about holiness? A look at the second version of the commandment might point to an answer.

Here in Deuteronomy, neither the creation nor the rest of
the creator are invoked as reason for observing the holy day.
Strikingly, Deuteronomy first stipulates that it is the slaves and
servants who deserve to rest on Shabbat, just like ourself, their
master. It then goes on to explain—God has given you the Shabbat
so that you remember you were once a slave too, but are now liberated. In the Shabbat of Deuteromy, the other to which we direct
our spiritual efforts is not the divine other, but the human other,
and the disprivileged one, as it is. Most significantly, the move
from the rest of my slave to remembering my own existence as a
slave shows that I myself can be other than I was before. Before I
was a slave, now not only I am free, but am also a master and a
lord. My slave too ought to be his own master for one day.
This version of the commandment on the Shabbat invites an
analogy to the one of Exodus. The existence of the enslaved near
me enables my recollection of my own past slavery, and shows
that when others become the center of our intention, a horizon
opens for us to experience how it is to be other than we are here
and now. Our own freedom, or more precisely in this context, our
own Herrschaft, becomes amplified. In an analogous way, when
we direct our intention toward God, the master and creator of the
universe, in imitating His rest (for how can one ever succeed in
imitating His work?), the possibility of being other than what and
who we usually are unfolds. Then can we maybe become less subordinate than we are usually, more lord-like, like the Lord.
Holy time is separated by various mechanisms and rites, but
these mechanisms can attest to the otherness of this special time
capsule, which can liberate us from our everyday human race for
dominance. The reasons which underlie the commandments of
Shabbat, and most notable that of refraining from labor, create
two focal points for the meaning of this holy time—God and the
poor and enslaved. When looking at the other, we emerge as
other than who we are, more liberated, more masterful. In final
account, then, holy time can make us holy.
Hillel Ben Sasson has recently submitted his doctoral dissertation, on the divine name
YHWH, in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He teaches at
Jerusalem University and is involved in progressive political thinking.
*** citations are from: Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Press, 2005

The philosophical question “Why does deadline pressure exist?”
is for many as fundamental a question as asking why God created
evil. Our crowded lives are ruled by Sisyphean cyclical commitments
that we can never completely fulfill. Lengthy “to do” lists push us
to the limits of endurance and our overcommitted schedules result
in routine panic, fatigue and irritability. Does Judaism have anything to say on the subject of time management?
Let us look at the most contradictory and stressful of Jewish
deadlines: the beginning of the day of rest. The Shabbat starts on
sundown Friday evening, in the winter it may begin as early as
4:00 p.m. Traditionally observant Jews are not permitted to work
during the Shabbat and cooking is included as a prohibited act.
However, observant Jews aim to celebrate the holiday with a warm,
cooked dinner on Friday night and a further two meals on Saturday.
All of these meals need to be prepared in advance. It typically falls
to the woman in the family to shop, clean the house, do the laundry
and have the dinner table set and ready on time, not to mention
getting other family members bathed, changed and ready for the
event. As an extra stress factor, it is seen by some as a sign of great
merit to have everything ready by midday on Friday (“Hatzot”).
Moreover, this multi-tasking whirlwind of a woman is expected to
be serene and poised at the dinner table. This must be the pinnacle of deadline stress, considering that many women work outside
the home in addition to their domestic duties.
Does it matter if Shabbat preparations run late and in general,
do Jews feel the need to be on time? Here we find huge differences
within Jewish ethnic and cultural groups. A German Jew, popularly
referred to as a Yekke, is stereotypically strictly punctual, whereas
a Lubavitcher Jew is branded as tardy. Hence the following joke:
“What happens when a Yekke marries a Lubavitcher?
The wedding starts exactly half an hour late.“
Some wedding invitations even print the time of the ceremony
followed by the words “Jewish Standard Time.” This means: “probably erring a bit on the late side, but never mind, no harm done.”
Is it appropriate to have a relaxed attitude to time and are there
moments when promptness and punctuality are critical in Judaism?
Although Jewish cultural groups may differ in their approach to

punctuality, the Hebrew Bible indicates its fundamental importance. Tardiness, whatever its cause, can lead to the most serious
of consequences:
“And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down
from the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto
Aaron, and said unto him: ‘Up, make us a god who shall go before
us.‘“(Exodus 32:1)
The Talmud interprets the Hebrew text to mean that Moses
was six hours late for his appointment with the people. The
throng became impatient and, in the absence of their leader,
decided to revert to idolatry and worship a golden idol. Idolatry
is completely antithetical to Judaism, a monotheistic faith which
does not believe that deities reside in golden calves, rocks or
trees. As the American Jewish thinker, Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel famously argued, Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at
the sanctification of time. The Jewish God resides in time, rather
than in a physical space. Jewish life is governed by time and temporal precision and one of the two major categories of holiness in
Judaism is kedushat ha-zman, the sanctity of time. Moses should
not have dithered and “Jewish Standard Time” is clearly not
endorsed from a religious perspective.
The Jewish Shabbat is a holy day for physical and mental
renewal, a time to restore balance in one’s life and to counter the
effects of weekday overdrive. Efficiency is necessary in order to
arrive at this restorative period of healing. Indeed to meet this or
any deadline, one needs to be diligent, organized and to develop
time management skills. Who said it would be easy? Most people
also need advice and a support network. Heed the wisdom of
Orthodox Jewish women:
1. Cook in advance, freeze.
2. Undressed salad and sliced fruit will keep in the fridge for
a day or two.
3. When defrosting bread, wrap it in foil. This keeps the
condensation off the bread so the crust will stay crisp.
4. Reuse the foil. (Jews also care about the environment.)
Michal Friedlander has worked at museums in New York, Los Angeles and Berkeley. She has
curated numerous exhibitions and published on a wide range of Jewish topics. Since 2001
she is Curator for Judaica and Applied Arts at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

The highest holidays in Judaism and Christianity are
the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and Easter, in
Protestant practice Good Friday. Both holidays are
characterized by an atmosphere of seriousness and
mourning. In the Jewish religious service, participants
are required to fast from sundown to sundown, and
to stand in the synagogue wearing a linen cloak otherwise reserved for the dead and particularly uncomfortable shoes. In the Christian rituals, fasting is not strictly
required, but the death by torture of Jesus of Nazareth
is vividly remembered in song, prayer, and liturgical
contrition. And just as the Christian Easter weekend
culminates with the sunrise on Easter Sunday, Yom
Kippur ends, after a long night and a long day, in the
evening, with the Neila prayer. That prayer conveys
the hope to have passed divine scrutiny, to have been
inscribed in the book of life for another year just
before the gates were closed.

Origins: Theologies of Sacrifice
Building upon Sigmund Freud’s thoughts in his last
book Moses and Monotheism, Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno speculated in their Dialectic of
Enlightenment as to whether the Christian religion
might not represent a return to barbarism in comparison with (Rabbinic) Judaism. As a matter of fact,
the religious historical perspective shows that both
Yom Kippur and Good Friday derive from a practice
originating in the post-exile period; namely the Service
of Atonement in the Temple of Jerusalem, with its animal sacrifices and scapegoat ritual, which is recorded
in the Old Testament. In Levitikus 16:21-24, we read:
21
And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of
the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of
the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all
their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and
shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the
wilderness: 22And the goat shall bear upon him all their
iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go
the goat in the wilderness.
23
And Aaron shall come into the tabernacle of the congregation, and shall put off the linen garments, which
he put on when he went into the holy place, and shall
leave them there: 24And he shall wash his flesh with
water in the holy place, and put on his garments, and
come forth, and offer his burnt offering, and the burnt

offering of the people, and make an atonement for
himself, and for the people.
In his book on Moses Freud assumes that the Christians’ belief in Jesus’ death of atonement is an appropriation of a trauma which the Jews had suppressed:
the purported murder of Moses, the founder of their
religion. Searching for the origins of this theology of
sacrifice as atonement in the New Testament, the
“Epistle to the Hebrews,”1 spuriously ascribed to the
Apostle Paul is enlightening. Chapter 9 of this epistle
in fact states as follows:
11

But Christ being come an high priest of good things
to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle,
not made with hands, that is to say, not of this world;
12
Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his
own blood he entered once and for all into the holy
place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. 13 For
if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an
heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: 14 How much more shall the blood of
Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself
without spot to God, purge your conscience of the
works of the dead to serve the living God?
15
And for this cause he is the mediator of the new
testament, that by means of death, for the redemption
of the transgressions committed under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise
of eternal inheritance. (Hebrews 9:11–15)
The Christ of the Hebrews’ Epistle is thus both slaughtering priest and victim for slaughter, in fact slaughtered victim, in one—a resumption, now spiritualized,
of the sacrificial victim theology of the priestly source.
This theme continues to resurface today in debates
over the character of the Last Supper—a subject of
fierce contention between Catholics and Protestants.
Rabbinic Judaism—Progress?
It appears in fact as though Rabbinic Judaism, which
had constituted itself anew after the destruction of the
Second Temple, left this sacrificial victim theology
behind it. The Mishnah—that is, the legacy of Jewish
oral tradition committed to writing by rabbis in the

1 In light of the brilliant Greek in which this epistle is written, Biblical scholars of the
New Testament largely agree that it must have been authored by someone who
either was himself a member, or was born to the family of a member, of the
Hellenized priestly caste of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, and who, following
the destruction of the Temple, came to believe that the crucified Jesus of
Nazareth was the Messiah.

second century of the Christian calendar—says laconically of Yom Kippur:
“Transgressions between a man and God are expiated
by the Day of Atonement; transgressions between a man
and his neighbor are expiated by the Day of Atonement
only if he has already achieved reconciliation with his
neighbor.” Yomah VIII 9 (b).
The historical context of the statement helps to
understand this better. It was written at a time when
the Temple of Jerusalem—the sacrificial requirements
for which are described in great detail by none other
than the Tract Yomah—was long since destroyed; when
(most probably) the rebel leader Bar Kokhba, once
acclaimed as the Messiah, had likewise met with defeat
and the Jews had been banned from Jerusalem; when
many disciples of the crucified Messiah Jesus tended to
believe, following the sermons of Paul the Apostle, that
God alone and only God could forgive man’s iniquities.
The rabbinic synedrion had now, after all hopes of
rebuilding the Temple in the near future were dashed,
to articulate a new theology, carefully distinguished
from both that of the priestly aristocracy and that of
Jesus’ various groups of followers. This theology had
to do justice to the tradition of Yom Kippur, practiced
only 60 years earlier in the Temple. It also cogently
rejected the idiosyncratic theology of those particular
groups who were influenced by Paul and his disciples.
This tract of the Mishnah, however, closes with the
words of Rabbi Akiba, who treats Yom Kippur as equivalent to an immersion bath, which, as he expressly
says, purifies the impure. “Thus,” and these are the
final words of the Tract Yomah, “the Holy One—blessed
be His Name—purifies Israel” (Yomah, VIII 9). While in
the Mishnah, therefore—at least in one respect—the
negotiations between man and man take center stage,
Rabbi Akiba—here in close harmony with the apostle
Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews—
focuses on the relationship between man and God, and
more specifically, on the relationship between God and
a group of men, the people of “Israel,” who have collectively become impure. It is hard to overlook the
fact that, for Akiba, as for Paul and the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, all authority and all initiative
lie with God, and not—as (elsewhere) in the Mishnah—
with individuals. These differences, which appear so
clearly in Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews and in Akiba,
were to provide the mill of Jewish philosophy with
grist well into the twentieth century.

Tenacious Archaisms and Christian Thought Patterns
in Judaism
In any event, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s hypothesis
about the relative progress of (Rabbinic) Judaism compared with Christianity goes a bit too far. In fact, even
today large parts of the Orthodox community follow
the practice of loading a live fish or even chicken with
their sins and then killing this animal. A more attenuated form of the scapegoat rite consists in going to a
river on the Day of Atonement and casting crumbs of
bread that have been symbolically loaded with sins
into the water. In fact, even Ashkenazi Judaism—Freud
failed to take this into consideration—re-stages bloody
traumata, though here Jews are the victims: in the socalled “Unetanneh Tokef” prayer, ascribed to the Rabbi
Amnon of Mainz, who may have lived in the tenth and
early eleventh centuries. The content of this prayer
constitutes a drastic vision of divine judgment, full of
fear and anxiety for the future:
“On New Year’s Day, it is inscribed, and on the Day of
Atonement, it is stamped, how many shall pass away
and how many shall be born, who shall live and who
shall die, who when ready and who too soon, who by
fire and who by water, who by the sword and who from
hunger, who in a storm and who from a pest, who shall
have peace and who turmoil, who shall find rest and
who shall wander aimlessly, who shall be carefree and
who racked by pain, who shall be high and who low,
who rich and who poor. But turning back, prayer, and
good deeds can ward off an evil fate.”
The Israeli historian of religion Israel Yuval summed
up the story of the legendary Rabbi Amnon as follows:
the rabbi, being harried by the bishop of Mainz to
convert to Christianity, requests a period of respite for
reflection. Finally, however, he concludes that he does
not wish to convert.
“Nor,” Yuval writes, “does he return, as promised, to the
bishop. When he is finally brought before him, he states
he is prepared to have his sinful tongue ripped out. The
bishop, however, preferred to have his ‘unwilling’ feet
cut off, along with his fingers and hands. Not long
thereafter, on New Year’s Day, Rabbi Amnon, together
with the amputated limbs, which have been preserved
in salt, is carried to the synagogue. At the climax of
the Kedushah, the benediction of the ‘Holy, holy …’,
he interrupts the prayer leader, in order, as he says, to
sanctify the name of God, and recites one of his own

texts, to wit: ‘Let us speak of the power of the holiness
of this day … .’ When he finished this Unetanneh Tokef,
he was spirited away before the eyes of all present,
for God had taken him unto Himself. Three days later,
Amnon appeared in a dream to a student, and taught
the boy the piyyut he had recited, so that he could disseminate it all over the world and help Amnon serve as
witness and memorial.”2
The christological foundations of this legend are
unmistakable, as are the Christian-influenced readings
of Yom Kippur as a day honoring the strict, harsh, and
vengeful Jewish God of the commandments, who is
scarcely capable of showing mercy. In this, we see
once again to what an extent Judaism is influenced by
Christianity; the rabbinic tradition of an enlightened,
inter-subjective theology of reconciliation—as it appears in the antique, rabbinic Mishnah—here recedes
deep into the shadow of this other, absolutist view. And
in Christianity? Has it ever occurred to Christians on
Good Friday—especially in the liturgy—to beg their
fellow men for forgiveness and reconciliation?

Micha Brumlik is professor emeritus of Education at the Goethe
University of Frankfurt/Main, where he was director of the Fritz
Bauer Institute for the Study and Documentation of the History
of the Holocaust from October 2000 to 2005. Since autumn of
2013 he is Senior Advisor at the Center for Jewish Studies
Berlin-Brandenburg.

Time has passed, flowed by, rolled on, blown away,
and we pass with it—what am I saying?—like smoke in a
strong wind. We ask ourselves what time might actually be, about which we say that everything glides and
runs by—with a tenacious naïveté that borders on total
ridiculousness, and then are taught by those thinkers
who are so adroit in logical play that the question,
when asked in such a banal form, is deceptive.—A few
exploratory experiments with the idea of time throw us
into total confusion: just exactly what that very old and
clever birdheaded Englishman says, following Zeno, in
an amusing paradox. Does the past exist? No, because
it is already gone. Does the future exist? No, because it

has not yet come. Then is there only the present?
Of course. But isn’t it so that the present contains no
stretch of time? It is so. Then there is no such thing
as time at all. Correct: It doesn’t exist. Russell’s paradox can be solved. Answers exist to many questions
about time, and sufficiently sharp and well-trained
thinkers have tried to find them. But what they’ve
come away with has little to do with our concerns.
In thinking about time, when we are not talking
about the time of physicists, for whom it is something quite different than it is for us, but about our
time which is always only ours, our lived time, our
temps vécu–in such thinking, we step forward
between two dangerous zones, both of which are
equally fatal. On the one hand, we are threatened by
dull ruminations and dilettantish brooding. On the
other, we have the technical language of the specialist in the discipline of philosophy, which, in sounding
learned, strives to prove its own significance more
than the value of its knowledge. And yet, we have to
try to press on, because it is time, lived time, or, if
you will, subjective time, which is our most urgent
problem. Problem? Once again a word from the
newspaper, smelling offensively of printer’s ink.
Time is our arch enemy and our most intimate
friend, our only totally exclusive possession and,
as we never seem to realize, our pain and our hope.
It is difficult to speak of it. Down from the magic of
mountain we hear: can time be narrated, this time
itself, as such, in and for itself? Definitely not; that
would be a foolish thing to enterprise. A story that
proceeded to tell that time flowed, it ran on, time
streamed along, and on and on–no one could sensibly call that a story.—It would not only not be a story,
as that famous magician, Thomas Mann, thought,
but it would also have nothing more to do with time
than the fact that it would take a little time, even if
only just a little. Flowing away, running on, streaming along, time does not do these things; such things
take place in space, experienced visibly or at least
as a consequence of what is seen. When we talk of
time, we use figures of speech from the world of
space, “spatiomorphic metaphors,” as one might
say to sound scholarly. Time is hardly narratable.
We say “hardly” and not unnarratable. Otherwise
we would have to remain silent instead of still eventually saying something, as we struggle to do, in
the space between the two danger zones. Figures
of speech may be useful as long as their figurative
nature is constantly acknowledged. And we can
employ our considerations, even those without
epistemological value, when we succeed in describing things in which others can discover
themselves again.

This depiction of the northern hemisphere was published in the famous
star atlas Harmonia Macrocosmica by 17th century German-Dutch
mathematician Andreas Cellarius. The geocentric relation between earth
and sky is based on ideas from antiquity, which were influential until the
Renaissance. According to Jewish belief, the alignment with the stars
allows humans to perform their religious rites in correspondence to the
celestial liturgy. The heavenly concept can be achieved in the material
world by observance of the ritual calendar.

There is evidence to the effect that the Jews of northwest and central Europe were, following the First
Crusade, increasingly left with no source of income
other than money-lending. This trade brought some
of them, like Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698–1738),
literary fame—albeit at the expense of their lives.
Others lived to see their name become a catchword,
synonymous with wealth. People like Mayer Amschel
Rothschild (1744–1812), Armand Hammer (1898–1990),
and George Soros (born 1930) obviously possessed
real talent for making money. But then there are people
who manage to turn every dollar into a half a buck,
although they work hard every day and would never
in a million years visit a casino. My father was one of
those men. Money meant little to him. Born a Jew in
Poland in 1913, he had learned early on how quickly
you can lose everything: your money, your home, and—
worst of all, because it is irreplaceable—your family.
Nevertheless, he had an infinite supply of basic faith—
not in humanity, but in human beings as individuals.
That led early on in my parents’ marriage to the necessity for my mother to register a trade and become a
businesswoman. How in the world would she have
survived without her own source of income? With
delightful regularity, my father came home from the
synagogue with dinner guests, even at the beginning,
when the two of them barely had enough to eat themselves. He lived according to the motto that as long as
you had something, you should give to someone even
worse off than yourself. That was how he had survived,
and no one could convince him otherwise.
You cannot really say that my father was unaware of
the significance of money. It is just that, in his opinion,
there was no value in saving it. It was always better to
grant yourself a small indulgence right away or help a
friend, or donate money to the SOS Children’s Villages.
Under no circumstances would he have considered investing in real estate. Not at a time when he and most
of his friends still dreamed of emigrating to Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, or New York City. A house or a
piece of land meant nothing more than a useless strain
on his resources, and—in case of an emergency—who
could say if you would be able to sell it in time for a
decent price? Assuming you even got a chance to sell,
and weren’t forced to run for your life.
It would be wrong, however, to claim my father had
no feeling for a good business deal during his approximately 20 years as a bar owner in Munich. In the district of Schwabing, for example, he was involved in

opening a really popular club. Later, he ran a bar that
had a steady clientele of American soldiers. Then he
whiled away his nights running a quaint eatery near
the Viktualienmarkt and operated a pretty hip disco
downtown for a time. The only problem was: there was
never enough left to live on once he had paid all his
taxes and operating costs.
By the way: my father had as little talent for inheriting as he had for making money. Every time my mother
thought he had let himself get hoodwinked yet again
by his shitfim, i.e., his business partners, she would
remind him of his pièce de résistance: the “house in
Villach.” This sore spot between my parents led as so
often to my learning another tidbit of family history. My
father had spent a part of his early childhood with relatives in Vienna. After the end of World War I and the
demobilization of the armies, my grandfather had him
come home to Galicia. By this time, which is to say after
the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Galicia had
become Polish. After 1945, a single house in Villach was
all that remained of the Austrian branch of the family,
and my father was the only heir that could be found. He
went to Villach and discovered a nervous family with
children in the house, fearing the possibility that the
property would be returned to its previous owners. He
decided he did not want to base any future prosperity on
the misery of others; so he renounced his inheritance.
My mother, Fela Presser, was in this respect no less a
shlimazl, by which I mean a walking disaster. She came
from a well-to-do family, which could afford—thanks to
her father’s reputation as a grain and cattle trader—a
beautiful house with a big garden and a large chicken
coop. After the Germans retreated from Poland, my
mother returned to her parents’ village to find their
house in an unspeakable, indescribable condition. My
grandmother (whom I was named after) had lived to
see the devastation wrought upon the black lacquered
furniture in her proudly and lovingly maintained teasalon. Being shot in 1943 spared her at least from having to find out the full extent of the catastrophe that
struck her family near and far. In light of the pogroms
rampant in postwar Poland, my mother had no intention of staying. She sold everything, every last bit. With
a suitcase full of cash and her two younger brothers in
tow, she got on a train heading west. By the time she had
arrived in the DP-camp Eschwege in the American zone,
the contents of her suitcase were entirely worthless.
When speaking about the generation born between
1900 and 1930, one refers to those on one side of the

Izydor Presser, Vater der
Autorin, in der Küche der
Discothek PICO17, im
November 1971.
Izydor Presser, the author’s
father, in the kitchen of the
club PICO17, November of
1971.

divide, whether perpetrators, accomplices, opportunists,
those who kept their mouth shut or one of the few who
actively resisted, as the “war generation.” Those who
survived the Shoah are referred to as the so-called “First
Generation,” as if they had been newly born instead of
broken, as if at the outset of a hopeful journey rather
than at the end of a trip to hell and back. The children
of those on either side of this divide—themselves today
55 to 85 years old—are viewed as the beneficiaries of
reconstruction and of the German “economic miracle.”
They are considered a generation of heirs, regardless
of whether their inheritance was unjustly acquired or
earned by luck, (I mean mazel) sweat and tears.
Whether it was DM 13.24 or DM 24.13 that my father
left his wife and children when he died in 1975, I cannot
say with certainty anymore. But I have since become
persuaded—contrary to all reason—that after centuries
of training there really is something like a predisposition
to economic success that can be passed on via heredity
in Jewish families. Presumably, it works through learning from example and societal pressures. My brother
and I must have missed out on this trait—otherwise the
story with the rug could never have happened.
My mother died in 1996, and soon after, the business
of liquidating her apartment came up. In terms of valuables that had survived from better days, there were
two old cabinets and two rugs. My brother wanted none
of it for his modern-style bachelor pad apartment. But
finally, he let himself be persuaded to take at least something as a keepsake. He chose an oriental rug, 3 x 2.2
meters, with a bright beige base color and a dainty ornamental pattern. God knows it was a beautiful piece.
Our mother had purchased it at a liquidation sale at a
bankrupt carpet store, and had forced me to help her
drag this “vilde metsiyeh“—crazy bargain—home.
Two years later my brother was married and a father.
When his daughter began to crawl, his wife reminded
him that he had a rug in the basement. The rug could
be really useful now—as it would keep the baby nice
and warm on the floor. The next time I came to visit,
there was a patterned rug about two by two meters in
their living room. Granted, the base tone of the rug
was beige, but you could see at a glance that it was
bargain basement cheap. My brother never noticed the
difference and denies to this day that there ever had
been any other rug in the then unlocked storage space
in the basement of his building.
Ellen Presser runs the the Cultural Centre of the Jewish
Community in Munich.

Sepp Herberger, the former head coach of the German
national soccer team, used to say: “A game lasts 90
minutes.” While that may sound like a fact, everything
in soccer can be interpreted subjectively. Herberger
wanted to motivate his players to concentrate. In the
final minutes of a game, strength and concentration
wane; so many goals are scored in the final phase.
None other than Schnellinger, the German pro then
playing for Milan in the regular season, overcame the
Italian artists of defence to shoot the tying goal in the
90th minute of the semi-finals in the 1970 Soccer
World Cup. The game went into over time, and those
120 minutes went down in history as the game of the
century. Italy prevailed 4:3; both teams played as if
their lives depended on victory; and the defenders on
both sides payed tribute, in sweat, to the Mexican heat.
But that is history, and what is history in soccer?
“What was was,” an Israeli coach once said in Spartan
English, when asked by a critic why he had wanted to
go to Germany in the 1950s to study at the Sports
University of Cologne. German teams were surprised
time and again at how considerately they were received
in Israel. But truisms about the unifying power of soccer
can be deceptive; the truth is more elemental. As the
master coach Béla Guttmann said: “there is no place
for sentimentality in soccer.”
Soccer lives from the game—from the moment of
play. Not even the slow-motion replay you can watch
100 times on the internet can ever replace a visit to
the stadium. The excitement of the game lies to a large
extent in its ephemerality, in its non-repeatability. The
game demands the full attention of players and fans. If
you go to get another beer, take a leak, or eat a sausage,
you risk missing the decisive moment of the game—
which doesn’t tarry, and tastes so sweet! And this need
not be a goal. It can be a trick, or a surprising play, which
you will never forget—if you were there to see it. Where
were you, when Sparwasser shot the decisive goal for
the GDR in the 1974 World Cup match against West
Germany? With a smile, I can say: “In the Volksparkstadion in Hamburg!” The uniqueness of that moment
will remain emblazoned on my memory forever.
Forever? This experience is limited by each individual’s
lifetime. But soccer also enables us to experience the
meta-individual and—at least rhetorically—the infinite.

“If we ban the ephemeral, ban beginnings and endings,
birth and death, we step out of time—and outside of
time is a stagnant nothingness …”

J M B JOURNAL

63

Transposing a church hymn, fans—in Liverpool and
elsewhere—sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with artless
passion. The legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly
confided in all seriousness: “Some people believe
Football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you, it’s much,
much more important than that.”
Soccer’s attraction derives from a local identification. Club patriotism, however, leads people to interpret what is “local” not too strictly. One of the season’s
highlights always lies in the so-called local derby, in
which “the narcissism of minor differences” (Freud) is
aggrandized. There is nothing more beautiful than a
bitter cross-town rivalry, as historically in the eponymous Derby itself. In Germany, rivalries thrive between
Bayern München and 1860, Nürnberg and Fürth,
Frankfurt and Offenbach, HSV and St. Pauli. And they
can be raised to a regional or national level: Dortmund
versus Schalke, for instance, or the nonpareil Spanish
Clásico Real versus Barça. Clubs take precedence.
Even today, the effectiveness of the English national
soccer team suffers from a local patriotism raised to
the level of club egotism. By the end of the regular
season, when the international tournaments are just
beginning, the English players are worn out from the
inhuman number of games they have already played.
The “Island style” of speed soccer takes its toll. Further,
the economic structure of the Premier League has
made it possible for sport entrepreneurs, oligarchs,
and sheiks to buy up famous teams for the purpose of
either generating big profits or using the teams as toys
of their prestige. Not only are the players exploited,
but the fans’ interests are sold short, as well. The swan
song of the sacrificial ram being wailed ever more
loudly these days hardly gets to the core of the problem—namely, the real danger that soccer is falling into
the hands of ambitious owners, who use its popularity
in order to increase their own wealth or prestige. Guys
like Berlusconi, who once were mere threats, now sit in
the luxury boxes next to other grandees, and do deals
of every kind imaginable and unimaginable.
The media’s interest in the game has opened up a
whole world of new opportunities to soccer. The media
have altered the time and space of soccer. In the nineteenth century, newspapers broadened soccer’s horizon
beyond the local game. In the first half of the twentieth
century, radio drew national and international attention
to the game. And in the second half of the twentieth
century, television enabled viewers to watch, “live,”

a game taking place somewhere far away. With the
advent of private television soccer became an everyday mass media event. The World Cup finals are the
biggest events in global television: in 2010, an average
of 329 million television viewers worldwide watched
Spain’s 1:0 victory over Holland live. The internet
allows people all over the world to follow their favorite
teams and players without missing a beat. In this way,
people can identify with foreign worlds; this challenges
the limitations of their soccer chauvinism. Fans bring
foreign national flags into the stadium to cheer on
international players on their local teams. In Argentina
and Brazil, there are special television programs that
report on the performance of “our Latinos” in Europe.
In this way, the pain of seeing your local soccer talent
drain into global capitals can be transformed into passionate participation.
Soccer passion—the ensuing pain and suffering that
inevitably accompany passion can scarcely be eluded.
Fans suffer wearing the jersey of their heroes; they
suffer from the uncertainty, the imperfection concomitant with the incompatibility of foot and ball.
Anyone who has ever tried to hold a ball up with his
foot has experienced firsthand the misfitness of this—
in comparison with the hand—clumsy extremity. By the
time they play at professional level, players have mastered their craft. But they must also have “game intelligence”—an even rarer gift. Without that peculiar form
of intelligence, there is no game—just amateur fumblings: “kick and rush.” A good game requires, besides
mastery of the ball and your own body, quickness and
the moment of surprise … and usually something goes
wrong. Goals are rare, fans suffer.1 Those who quit for
lack of success, or leave the stadium before the final
whistle blows, are not fans. And those who cannot
master the offside rule are just as bad. That rule is
what creates the flexible space needed for an artful
game from within the hard borders of the field.
The human power of sight is often inadequate to
judge whether that space has been stretched or ruptured, for you must capture the placement of all defensive and offensive players at the moment when the ball
is passed. If a player passes too late—or races toward
the goal too soon—he will be punished by the referee’s
offside whistle. The defense strategists must keep
their eye on the player with the ball as well as on two
i The Italian word tifoso recalls typhoid fever, the Brazilian torcida evokes the body
of fans twisting in pain, when they hope to turn their team’s luck around through
their expression of sympathy.

forwards who might be elusively switching positions. It
all depends on hitting just the right moment—on what
in classical Greek dramaturgy is termed kairos.
The playing field appears to be defined by straight
lines. The game time is measured by a quartz clock.
But was that ball really out? And exactly how long is
“extra time” . . .? Ninety minutes, Bob’s your uncle!
You might think that science is taking over soccer. But
did you see that? The referee must be blind! The ball
was in the net! Even the most feckless layman has
heard of the Wembley Goal of 1966—which gave us the
much-discussed term of that “brief moment when the
ball was behind the line.” A fan in the stadium cannot
tell with the naked eye whether the ball was completely
behind the line or not. Can the chip help? Maybe. Some
demand video replay to ensure objectivity. But scientific rationality has its limits. Whether a player has
committed a foul or not, whether a handball was intentional or an accident, will remain a subject for debate.
For higher powers are at work in the game. And fans
know how to invoke them. Soccer is no ersatz religion;
but its devotees do develop their own quasi-religious
practices. The fan’s attire recalls a church service. With
prayer shawl, head-scarf, and frock, fans go on pilgrimage to the stadium. The most hoary and venerable
stadiums are reverentially referred to as “temples of
soccer:” Maracanã, Wembley, Camp Nou. It’s all about
glamour, magic, and faith, accompanied by love and
hope. And reigning from high above all this is the
invisible god of soccer, a universal creation of the
community of fans.
The god of soccer—a figure that might have been
invented by the anthropological critic of religion
Ludwig Feuerbach—is honored all over the world. But
in the direst of crises, his existence or benevolence is
also doubted with an intensity worthy of the Book of
Job. That excruciating quantum of uncertainty which
is ever present, that irreducible element of chance can
cause the most carefully thought-out strategy to totter
and fail. The best team does not always win; even the
most distant long shot has a chance. And in the victory
of the underdog lies a source of human happiness that
can reach utopian proportions: the last can be first—
even on this earth.
Detlev Claussen is a journalist and professor of Social Theory and
the Sociology of Culture and Science at the University of Hanover.
His book Béla Guttmann. Weltgeschichte des Fußballs in einer
Person (“Béla Guttmann. Universal History of Soccer in One Man”)
was published in 2012 by the Berenberg Verlag, Berlin.